A Small Town Intern adjusts to the Big City
This post finds me, Mary Barthelme, in the third week of my internship at the Jewish Museum of Maryland. I am an archives intern working on the Baltimore Hebrew University archive material. This post, however, will go into detail of my hectic and slightly overwhelming first week at the JMM and my transition, still in process, of learning to live in a city.
With my trusty, and well used, GPS I made it on time to the JMM for day one of Orientation on June 1st. After going through the basic introductions from director Avi Decter, staff and other interns we proceeded to workshops and tutorials. As interns, we learned how to handle collections objects correctly from Jobi Zink, Senior Collections Manager, and about the general layout of the museum. I’ll summarize the day by stressing that it was both confusing and exciting looking ahead to the coming 10 weeks of the internship.
Day 2 of Orientation, June 2nd, started at 10am again and once again all 8 interns were introduced to more of the fascinating life of a museum employee including learning about the computer system past perfect from Jobi and how to use our cameras properly to take good pictures from Elena Rosemond-Hoerr. Below is one of the pictures I took for the competition among interns to take the best picture.
As indicated by my blog title, I am a small town girl living in a big American city for the first time. I won’t lie; I was extremely scared as I arrived in Baltimore and the Museum. In these first few weeks, however, I have received such wonderful help and outpouring of kindness from both the staff and people of Baltimore. I believe that I am finally adjusting to my new surroundings! I am excited to see what the next 8 weeks bring with both my work in the BHU archives at the Museum and also learning to successfully live in a part of America that has more than 10,000 people and A LOT more cows.
A blog post by intern Mary Barthelme.